A rave at three in the afternoon with nobody drinking

Weston Park, near Shifnal, a Sunday in late May. It is light outside and it will be light for hours yet. There is a tent, there is a rig, and there is nothing to drink, because Soul Revolution does not have alcohol or anything else on site. People have brought their kids. That is the room, and I am about to play it for the next couple of hours.

If the only raves you have been to are the other kind, that sounds like a punishment. I know. I grew up around the other kind. My parents were rave culture, I had decks before I had finished school, and for most of the twenty years since I have played rooms where the bar was doing half of my job. Alcohol lowers the threshold. People dance sooner, and they dance worse, but they dance.

Take the bar away and the first forty minutes are honest. Nobody moves because it is eleven o’clock and they have had three pints. They move when the music makes standing still feel stupid. That is the whole craft of a sober floor: getting a room full of sober adults, in daylight, to the point where standing still feels stupid, without any of them noticing that you did it.

What it looks like from the booth

At the start it looks like nothing. People stand near the edges. They talk, they look at their phones, they look at each other. A few sway in a way they think nobody can see. This is the bit that finishes off DJs who came from clubs, because in a club you would already be building, and here, if you build, you lose them. The room is not ready and it can tell when you are trying to make it ready.

Then one person stops looking at everyone else. That is always how it starts. Not a group, one person, usually somewhere in the middle, who decides that the music is more interesting than the question of what they look like. Five minutes later there are four of them. Ten minutes after that the room has gone, and it does not come back until I bring it back.

Why the music has to do more

In a club the music is one of several drugs. Here it is the only one, and it has to carry the whole load. In practice that means two things.

Tempo. I start slower than a club would and I stay there longer than feels comfortable. A sober room needs to be walked up, not shoved. If I could give you the numbers I would, and I will, in a separate note about how I build a set, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

The drum. There is a djembe in the booth and I hit it, over the records, for real. There is also a microphone. Nothing tells a room it is allowed to move like a hand on a skin, live, in time, by a person they can see. A machine can hold a rhythm forever. It cannot decide to lean into a bar because it saw somebody’s shoulders drop.

What it is not

It is not a wellness class. Nobody will ask you to share. Nobody will explain what you are meant to feel. There is no circle, and if there is a talk, it happens somewhere else and you can skip it.

It is not quiet. People assume sober means gentle. It means loud with the lights on.

By the second hour of a good one the floor is doing everything a club floor does at two in the morning, and it is the middle of the afternoon and there are kids on the floor, because it is that kind of festival. I have no idea how to explain that to someone who has not seen it, which is why I keep playing them.

It is not a scene of people who have given something up. Some have. Plenty have not. Most of them just prefer remembering the night.

Where this happens

The festivals I hold residencies at are the easiest way in: Soul Revolution at Weston Park in May, Oh Shala Bakti in Buckinghamshire in July, Tribes of Beorma in the Malvern Hills. I have written about the festival side separately. Awaken, the events brand I run, does it in the Midlands.

If you want to hear what one sounds like before you commit an afternoon to it, the mixes page has six full sets. The Soul Revolution closing set from 2024 is the one to start with.